EasyEngine Version 4 Released! 🎉

I’m a big fan of EasyEngine — a script to self-host your WordPress sites on DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, and more.

🤔 Over a year ago, Rahul (who runs a WP VIP agency rtCampp) suggested that EasyEgine has not been getting the contribution support it should have received from the WordPress community — being an open source script, because it was written in Python.

👌 With an audacious goal of rewriting the entire framework in PHP and support it with WP CLI has actually now been achieved. Version 4, has just been released. Mad props to all the contributors for their effort.

🚀 I urge you all to take this open source server management software for a spin. It is now based on PHP + Docker and they even have made an effort to create a migration script from v3 to v4. Which shows the commitment to quality and supporting your community.

The least we can do is appreciate this effort and welcome the new changes, i.e. PHP based server (Slack does that), and Docker support (without overstating, for obvious reasons).

The number of sites on a single server is limited to 25. Fortunately, WordPress Multisite is counted as one site towards the limit.

From four WordPress caching options, we have shifted to only one. Migration script automatically takes care of this unless you have customizations around cache.

Some commands are removed, either temporarily or permanently. Some are replaced & renamed. There are also new commands that have been added.

v4 is rewritten in PHP, using WP-CLI as a framework. Shouldn’t concern you, unless you have some local python-patches.

v4 uses Docker images for PHP, Nginx, MySQL, etc instead of traditional OS level packages. Again, you would be fine if you have never heard about Docker before.

🎉 For All Users – New v4 Stuff

EasyEngine v4 adds many new features. It also has many internal changes in terms of code, architecture and focus area. Let me walk you through some of them, below.

🎯 Focus Shift – From Ops to DevOps

Until EasyEngine v3, our focus was to create a powerful hosting stack to make the system admin’s job easy. We are still committed to making hosting easy and I believe that we are advancing in that direction, at quite a steady pace.

After working in the WordPress ecosystem for 10 years, I can say that most of the scaling issues, that are hard to fix, are often caused by bad code. The issues related to bad server config are much easier to fix than an issue related to bad code quality.

From v4, our goal is to reduce the gap between the developer & system admin workflow.

🙌 Credits

A bunch of rtCampers worked tirelessly, day and night – over the last 10 months, to make this release possible. They were helped by more than a dozen colleagues, at different stages. Overall, EasyEngine v4 took more than 10,000 hours of work.

A big shout out and thanks to Mriyam, Riddhesh, Radhe, Kirtan, Sagar N, Rahul P, Utkarsh and the other rtCampers for this exciting release! 🚀

EasyEngine Team celebrating v4 release 🎉

On behalf of the EasyEngine team, I thank you, our users, who have kept us going in the last two years! 🙏

Maedah Batool is a WordPress Core Contributor, Technical Dev Manager and a part-time Journalist. She created a tech-training startup called FinkTanks where she has taught 1,000+ girls how to code with WordPress.